Boring Company Approved To Build Futuristic Garage That Would Connect To Underground Commuter Tunnel (mercurynews.com)

On Tuesday night, the Hawthorne City Council gave Elon Musk's Boring Company the green light to build a prototype for a new garage that would connect passenger cars to the entrepreneur's envisioned underground hyperloop. The Mercury News reports: Musk's Boring Company recently bought a private residence abutting the one-mile underground tunnel it already built beneath 120th Street between Hawthorne Boulevard and Prairie Avenue near SpaceX. The garage at the residence would connect to the tunnel. But as part of its approval, the company agreed not to open the test elevator to the public or to have cars move in and out of the garage from the street. Cars would enter the tunnel from the SpaceX campus, move through the tunnel and on to the garage and then back to SpaceX, so the test process would not create additional traffic on the street. The company wants to show that it can utilize an elevator and short tunnel spur for developing a high-speed underground public transportation system. It plans to rent the house as well.

As sketched out in public documents, a car would drive onto a "skate" that connects to a hyperloop track, such as the ones being developed by two private companies and recently featured in the collegiate Hyperloop Competition at SpaceX. The company also on Tuesday earned approval for a separate short spur from its existing tunnel in order to remove a boring machine that it first intended to leave in the ground. Originally, the company planned to bore a two-mile length of tunnel, but as company representative Jane Labanowski explained to the City Council, they identified an opportunity to remove its expensive cutter head. So, it now plans to reduce the tunnel length to just one mile and extricate it from another piece of property the company recently purchased.

Comments

Re:Passenger cars in a hyperloop tunnel?

[Rei]

This has nothing to do with Hyperloop. Hyperloop is a longer-term objective. This is about Loop. That said, both Loop and Hyperloop are - regardless of what the Dugout Loop prototype will do - designed for hauling both cars and passenger capsules. The whole point of all of the work they're doing right now is prototyping and testing. Even Dugout loop is just a larger-scale test.

Re: actually

[Rei]

You FUDsters are hilarious. Musk goes on Joe Rogan, demonstrates little knowledge about pot (including being apparently unaware of the existence of blunts, asking whether it's a joint or a cigar, and after having it explained to him, responding, "so it's like posh pot, tobacco pot?"), studies it like a curious scientist examining an alien species for the first time, takes one non-inhaled puff, shrugs his shoulders (**everyone screenshots here), shakes his head no, gives it back, and later talks about how he doesn't like marijuana because it hinders his ability to accomplish things that make a difference in the world.

In FUD world, this translates to "Boring's CEO may be too busy hitting the rock and/or getting stoned"

I'll repeat: you FUDsters are hilarious ;) Meanwhile, Musk got 11 million people (in under a week) to watch a 2 1/2 hour interview with him which has gotten over 72 thousand comments on Youtube, with by far most reactions to Musk being positive. As an example, at the time of writing this post, here's the newest comments in the thread that concern Musk:

"The way elon scans his brain after every question freaks me out but it's kinda badass"

"I love this man. He's not a typical high roller business man that's for sure. We need more Elon Musks in the world. "I love humanity, I think it's great.""

"Why does it seem like Elon Musk has already seen the end? He must be visiting us from an unknown realm and couldn't help but feel sorry for us."

"Elon seem mildly autistic"

"Damn, this guy is really a genius."

"This will be a tough one to beat. This one was by far my favorite Joe Rogan interview and likely my favorite interview I’ve ever watched. I’ve given Joe jazz in the past, but we’re all human, and I can’t deny the great job Joe does giving us Internet consumers one hell of a platform into so many fascinating minds - including Joe’s. Thank you, Joe. Thank you, Elon. This was truly great. We’re living in a amazing time in history. Love IS the answer. It starts with oneself."

"So i just rewatched Iron Man recently... And Elon Musk is basically our real life Tony Stark. I love that guy."

I'll also add that while I'm personally not a fan of intoxicating substances of any stripes, I find it rather silly that nobody seems to care about the fact that they're drinking whiskey during the interview. Which is more of a "debilitating" substance. One non-inhaled puff on a blunt? "OMG!" Drinking whiskey? "Meh...."

Hopefully soon, more info about this aspect

[Rei]

Here's to hoping that we soon get more info about their surface connections. Because they've talked almost nothing about them and to me it seems like the hardest part. Loop, in their ultimate design goal, fundamentally requires large numbers of these surface stations (in contrast to subways that use a smaller number of large terminals), so you have to be able to build them quickly and cheaply. You obviously can't make them with a TBM, it's not just going to make a sharp right-angle turn and drive vertically to the surface. And while the main tunnel can be as deep as you want in order to avoid city infrastructure, every single one of the surface stations has to penetrate every layer below it en route to the Loop tunnels.

I really want to see what their approach is to be able to rapidly make the vertical tunnel segments while quickly detecting and avoiding or rerouting any unmarked underground hazards or infrastructure. Their ease of getting permits en masse will depend on how well they can demonstrate causing minimal disruption to everyday life. To me, this sounds like the hardest part of the whole Loop goal.

Re:Hopefully soon, more info about this aspect

[RhettLivingston]

In addition, these surface tunnels can't just drop straight into the main loops. To be able to carry any real volume in the main loops, you can't have acceleration occurring on the loop. If you accelerate on the loop, you have to maintain a ridiculous gap between vehicles to allow for a car or carrier to enter the loop and accelerate before being rear ended. The throughput would suck.

The solution is to have lots of acceleration and deceleration tunnels that merge with the loop and some automated management of the merging process. Given that tunnels are planned to be cheap, this is likely the intended solution.

So a connection involves an elevator to get through the crud closest to the surface using the shortest route (straight down cuts through much less crud than ramping down) connecting to a ramp that leaves the loop, passes a bunch of elevators, and rejoins the loop.

Extra points to anyone who can design an off ramp that splits off in such as way as to make it impossible for any vehicle to ever hit the divider because that is the only point in the system where a head on collision with a wall could happen.

Re:Hopefully soon, more info about this aspect

[Rei]

Indeed - "feeder tunnels" and onramps/offramps are an explicit part of their plan. That's a relatively straightforward part - just more boring, at depth. It's the vertical access shafts that they've not talked much about, and which seem to be the trickiest part. So here's to hoping for more info about their approach here.

Re:Hopefully soon, more info about this aspect

[Kiuas]

It's the vertical access shafts that they've not talked much about, and which seem to be the trickiest part. So here's to hoping for more info about their approach here.

Yup agreed. The elevators will be the part of the system that gets congested most easily and I've yet to see any info as to how they're planning to avoid having long lines of cars waiting to be taken up/down on the entrance/exit points while also keeping the costs reasonable.

This is where the whole project stands or falls. It doesn't matter how well the tunnel infrastructure below is set up if accessing said infrastructure and getting away from there involves a ton of waiting. The placement of the elevator access-points on the surface is also a bit of a question mark: how do they plan to place these things such that the cars waiting to get in and getting out of these will not cause problems for the surface traffic?

Re:Hopefully soon, more info about this aspect

[mlyle]

Assuming uniform loading for capacity factors is erroneous. People take more trips at 8AM than at 3AM or 2PM. Adding more station density out at the edges of San Jose doesn't help capacity in the downtown at rush, too.

Re:Hopefully soon, more info about this aspect

[alvinrod]

If an elevator takes 1 minute per loading, which (between cars and passenger capsules) averages 3 passengers, then the maximum daily passengers from that terminal is 4320.

It's far worse than that, because there are big spikes in traffic at certain times of the day and other times where there's almost no one on the road and no traffic that would cause a person to use this service unless it's overall less expensive. However, it doesn't need to be able to hold the entirety of all traffic, just enough to reduce congestion on the main roadways where everything is jammed up. Also, there's nothing that says you have to design a system that can only load a single vehicle at a time. It may be more economical to make a bigger elevator that loads multiple vehicles at a time, which is what you'd want to do if there are certain times where you'll always be able to fill up that elevator. The really slick design would be an elevator system that can handle a single vehicle for the times when traffic is light, but also has a mode to handle five or more during peak use times.

I think that there are some other problems in your calculations as well. I wouldn't be surprised to find that over 80% of traffic is trying to go to less than 20% of the city, so you can't just plop down terminals evenly as most would not handle enough traffic to be able to justify the cost of building them. There's also the issue that because of this, all we're really doing is pushing the bottleneck closer to the end points. However some of this can be solved by attaching your entry/exit points to large parking garages. At least that keeps traffic from spilling out onto the streets, but it's still an issue when a lot of people all get off work at around the same time and need to queue up in the garage. Fortunately that's exactly the kind of place that would not mind acting as a giant terminal.

And so Elon Musk

[maroberts]

..completes his transformation from hero to villain by having a secret underground lair

Re:This is how the Lizard People take over

[Sique]

But lizards are poikilotherms, meaning that they become slow if not in the Sun. What sense does it make for them to dig tunnels which create an advantage for homeotherms like the humans?

Re: actually

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you been there? Most of the work Elon Musk does is engineering, like 80% of the work he does.

> This celebrity bullshit everything has to end, it is a lie, a great big fat, psychopathic egoistic lie.

Good luck with that. We need role models. It can even be observed in toddlers. It is never going to end. Certainly not within our lifetime, and not for the next 1000 years either. Now get with the program and be a better role model instead.

>Be careful who you call a real like Tony Stark, a make believe characters with a really good public relations team, that believes themselves above the law and above government, in real life, those fuckers belong in prison.

This again. Prison? Why? What criminal law did he break this time?

Re:Passenger cars in a hyperloop tunnel?

[Rei]

OMG, a car caught fire - quick, get breathless overcoverage of it! Wait, you already did? Good!

There's one car fire in the US for every 20 million miles driven and one fatality per 85 million miles.

Teslas have been driven 9 billion miles. This should correspond to 450 fires and 106 deaths.

Where are they?

Concerning fires, here's a list of Tesla fires between 1 January 2013 and 11 March 2018, which is the vast majority of Tesla miles. The total count? 14. Vs. an expected 450.

Concerning fatalities, three months ago an anti-Tesla Twitter account added up the number of deaths in Teslas and arrived at 34. Note that many of these occurred in other countries like China that have a much higher road fatality rate than the US. It's still a third of the expected number for US-only driving of that many miles.

Let's look at the newest Teslas, shall we - the Model 3? So far there have been no fatalities and no reports of fires in customer cars (there was one Model 3 found up for scrap that had been gutted by fire, but it was "Location: Fremont" with 1 mile on the odometer, so clearly something that happened at the factory. Also, the fire damage was heaviest on the bumper, where it had melted the alumium - but hadn't managed to do so over the pack itself. So it's not clear that a battery fire was actually involved). But how many miles have been driven for this rate of "0/1 fires and 0 deaths"?

Lacking specific numbers, the best we can do is estimate. The average driver drives around 12k miles per year. Owners of new cars put significantly more miles on them during their first year, and particularly first few months because - obviously - it's a new car that they bought because they wanted to drive it. Bloomberg says there were around 25k made in the past month (0-1m ago), 19k in the previous month (1-2m ago), then 13,5k (2-3m ago), then 9k (3-4m ago), the 9k (4-5m ago), then 6,5k (5-6m ago), and 9k earlier than that. So around 19k*(30k/12)*0,5 + 13,5k*(30k/12)*1,5 + 9k*(26k/12)*2,5 + 9k*(23k/12)*3,5 + 6,5k*(21k/12)*4,5 + 9k*(18k/12)*6 = ~315M miles. Meaning if they were gasoline cars we should expect 16 fires and 3 1/2 deaths. Where are they?

Re:Passenger cars in a hyperloop tunnel?

[Rei]

I mean, I assume you're equally diligent about reporting fires in gasoline cars, right? I totally remember your coverage of, say, the million BMWs that were recalled in 2017 due to over 40 parked cars - not cars involved in accidents, but parked cars - spontaneously bursting into flames, right? That's just up to 2017. And they keep getting more fires and keep issuing more recalls this year. The BMW fires have been particularly prolific in South Korea, where 11 burst into flames in July alone.

Want something more recent? Just seven days ago, Ford recalled two million trucks due to fire risks. GM's last major fire-related recall was a couple years, their *third attempt* to fix a problem that was causing cars - often ones that were parked - to burst into flames. Also seven days ago a million Priuses were recalled due to a fire risk in the wiring harness. Need I keep going? Remember here that we're not talking about fires in these cars from crashes - we're talking only the subset of fires that occur during normal use. Fires in gasoline cars during crashes are effectively a problem flagged "WONTFIX" by the NHTSA.

Re: actually

[Rei]

What, they haven't landed an air force contract in the past week? Heavens to betsy!

Re: actually

[dbialac]

I'm starting to get the idea that he's preparing to start living in a hollowed out volcano from where he can launch rockets. Has he acquired a white cat yet?

Re:Waiting for thunderf00t

[Kiuas]

Thunderf00t has done a great job debunking all of Teslas terrible ideas, and he has already started on the Boring company and how terrible their plans are.

Thunderf00t has not actually criticized Tesla itself. He's done a lot of videos in the absurdity of the Hyperloop as a non-viable thing due to the enginerring (and cost) problems for example here, here (a video where he actually traveled to the Hyperloop test-site to showcase the sub-par engineering work done with the track (it's already rusted through for example)) and here (a video he made in response to the backlash to the previous video). And he also did an video earlier this year about this tunnel stuff and its problems here as well as a video on the absurdity of Musk's idea of using rockets to travel 'Earth to Earth' here.

Musk's thing is that he has a lot of ideas as well as the capital to try and test some of them. Sometimes they're successful, sometimes they're not, but thanks to Tesla and SpaceX the man is now treated in the media as if he is Midas and everything coming from him must be 'the way of the future', but that's not really the case. Personally I don't expect the Hyperloop to become a reality ever just due to the cost-factors involved, that is, it's not that with enough money you couldn't potentially build a Hyperloop that worked,. but that building and securely maintaining one would likely be so costly that it'd make no sense, and the same problems are faced by this tunnel idea. With Musk the question is not primarily whether it's it's possible technically, it's whether or not it's economically feasible as a solution.

Re: actually

[jellomizer]

The problem is we seem to not be able to separate someones ability to do a job, with their inability to to do something that isn't their job.
A CEO isn't a Model Citizen, or even a good spokes person. Their the Chief Executive Officer, So their job is to make the big decisions, and drive the company in a/on particular direction(s).

A good CEO will put the company in a good direction where there is growth and influence. An effective CEO will keep the company on tract in a direction (good or bad). A Bad CEO will cause chaos in the organization and have the company just fiddle in whatever stuff they seem they want to do. Sometimes this works, but most of the time it will just lead to failure.

Re: actually

[Mkkby]

This boring company stuff is beyond nonsense. Pick the most expensive way to do commuting. Pick the least flexible when commuter needs change. You got it -- tunnels.

I thought self driving was gonna revolutionize commuting. There is NO NEED for this worthless company, except to promote Musk and his *genius*.